Rachel thought, What the hell…?

Angular shapes came at them, diving close and then veering away, apparently sizing them up. Needle-nosed predators, she would have guessed if this were undersea biology—but this was a hot, gassy plume in vacuum. All these creatures were much smaller than Silver Metal Lugger, but she did not like their numbers. More flocked in as she watched. They seemed to come from back toward the pale-blue plume, as though they feasted on the hydrogen, hid among the streams, and then came out to forage.

Predator/prey ratios in high vacuum? Or more like cloud life?

“Great, we play this by ear. Our bots deployed?”

They are popping out from their hatches.

She could see the clunky forms walking on magnetics across the ship’s silvery skin. The teeming ruby sky reflected in the hull, making a double geometry of whirling seethe. The skylife wheeled and darted in gaudy flocks in that sky. They had backed away, once the bots were out. The creatures looked more like kites than birds, while the bots were solid, rugged, probably of no interest to these gas-eaters. Plus unknown danger.

The bots followed their grid sweep commands. They found rips and gouges and filled them with quick-fix patches. Rachel understood as she watched. She always liked to do maintenance in case they had a major, subtle problem. It also gave her time to think.

This was a crazy outcome. The theory boys had imagined that this ringhole was a gateway, long unused until Fraq’s ship came through it. So by all odds the other end—or ends, since nobody knew if these could have multiple mouths—should be in open space, probably far from a star. They thought this, even though the Lugger had originally snatched the wormhole from a coronal magnetic arch on the sun.

But then, the original wormhole wasn’t an ordinary one, either. It had the equivalent of negative mass, since something at its other end had been pouring mass out through it, forcing the curvature of spacetime nearby the mouth to act as if it held a net negative in its mass budget. Now the thing had stretched and tangled in the tender grasp of techies who didn’t know what they were doing—and presto, it had spin and was even more confusing.

Crazy but real, not her favorite category.

“This doesn’t feel like progress,” Rachel mused to herself. Her lips must have shaped the words, because Erma read them.

We are making great discoveries! This is far more interesting than hauling ore and comets around.

“Far more dangerous, too. Thing is, we don’t know how to get back. That hydrogen column is huge. We can’t find our way around in it. The ringhole—where’s that? And—”

We can learn more by reconnoitering. Once our repairs—

A bullet-shaped brown thing shot along the hull. This was different, not an airy thing but solid.

It clipped a bot and sent it tumbling into space. The bullet-shape turned in a tight arc and came back. It tossed another bot off-hull with a shrug, as it passed.